From Process Engineer to Product Veteran: Insights from Joel Polanco of Intel

Speaker A: Welcome to the Inflection Podcast, where we explore the pivotal moments that have shaped us into who we are today. I am your host, Anebi, and I can't wait to dive into these moments with you. Let's get it all right. Welcome to this episode of the Inflection Podcast. It's a pleasure to have the man, the myth, the legend, Joel, uh, Polanco with me today, longtime product veteran and a thought leader in the product space. You created a lot of great content and thought leadership around product and business. You've worked build your career over the past two decades at intel and advised a bunch of startups on the side in the areas of product, GTM and whatnot. And it's a pleasure to have you on, uh, the podcast with us today.

Speaker B: Yeah, thank you. It's been a long time coming. We talked about this a while back.

Speaker A: It's been a long time.

Speaker B: So thank you. I'm a huge fan.

Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. One angle I want to take today is blowing things up a bit or pulling back the curtains to talk about your product journey. A lot of product managers, product folks I talk with, didn't grow up thinking, hey, someday I'm going to become a product manager. Right. Usually it's accidental or a series of fortunate accidents along the way. So let's talk about yours. Uh, you've been at intel over 20 years at this point. And why did that look like getting in product in the first place?

Speaker B: Yeah, even if I go back before that, I don't think any schoolwork, you know, where they're asking, what do you want to be when you grow up? I wrote down product manager. I think I wrote down, actually, I wanted to be either a fireman or a professional bowler.

Speaker A: No way.

Speaker B: So, yeah, neither of those things ended up happening. But after I finished college at Arizona State, I wanted to go into manufacturing. And so here in Phoenix, Intel's big manufacturer of semiconductors, and I really wanted to do that because I frankly at the time thought manufacturing was not going to be around in the United States. The trend was, you know, continuous decline in manufacturing, and I might not get that opportunity again. So I started off in the fab, wore the spacesuit. So we wear a clean, um, room suit, a bunny suit. And I was a process engineer. And so I was going in every day and working on the tools. We call them tools. They're machines processing chips or wafers that go through them and trying to make sure that they were up and producing.

Speaker A: Did you do the day shifts or the Night shifts for that.

Speaker B: Uh, so I did the day shift. I was fortunate. I did some night shifts for training and that was really tough those nights, you know that you're basically working 6pm to 6am oh man, that would mess

Speaker A: up your circadian rhythm so bad.

Speaker B: Oh my gosh. It's not for the faint of heart for sure, but I was on day shift and I think I got to this point where I was looking outside of the Fab and looking outside the factory and I wanted to try something else. I had come to a point in my career after about six years where I said I, uh, can either stay here and just stay in the factory and go after, you know, factory manager route or something like that, or I could go and explore other parts of the business.

Speaker A: Did intel have at that point two different career tracks for even factory? Those wanted to stay ic individual contributor route versus manager route. So like more technical if you use, uh, that term versus on the managerial side or was it just.

Speaker B: Yeah. And actually at all parts of intel they have that, that sort of track. So on the IC path though, it's very technical usually. So it's an engineer up to like a principal engineer level and then on the IC it's in some form of management.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: But I wanted to do something else. I went back to school for my mba and I was hoping that would position me to be able to interview for something else. And I was either going to go into supply chain or marketing. I ended up going into marketing. And you could not have been any further from the fab in marketing. You know, it was just.

Speaker A: Was that what you were going for though? Like something very different from the fab to augment your technical experience there, or was it again accidental in going that route?

Speaker B: I was intentional in that I wanted to go into either supply chain or marketing. And I was able to leverage my analytics background as being an engineer into marketing analytics. And so I worked on an operations team and we spent most of our calories looking at consumer sales of PCs, tablets and phones. And so I work with folks doing forecasting. At one point I had set the annual performance bonus for our consumer sales. So I got these really big opportunities.

Speaker A: All within Intel.

Speaker B: All within Intel.

Speaker A: So what did that look like? So you were at intel, you went back to school, did your mba while at intel, you didn't go full time to the MBA and come back, you just went on the side. Wow. Yeah, that's a lot of work and hustle to make that happen.

Speaker B: That was tough. And my wife, you know, bless her for having the patience because I was working 6am to 6pm, a lot of days and then going to school twice a week, like seven to 10. So yeah, it was some long days there for a while.

Speaker A: Oh my gosh. Well, that's super helpful.

Speaker B: Yeah. Coming back to product though. So I'd been in these analyst roles and uh, it got to a point where I was like a super user of these systems that it had built. And because I knew them so well, in fact I knew them so well, they started to come to me asking for requirements like, what do you think we should build next? And what do you think we should work on? And that positioned me for my next role, which was as a product manager and analytics. And so I was actually the one asking folks for requirements or defining requirements of working with the uh, technical teams to develop our technical, our analytics systems.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's amazing. So you started fleshing out requirements, helping them maybe build their backlog for things stories to take on later on. How long did that last for you and where you're like, I could see myself growing here as a product person versus maybe trying another career path.

Speaker B: Yeah, totally. So I think I, you know, probably a super user for maybe a year or two. And then an opportunity showed up with another team to actually lead the analytics team and then build a team to focus on our CRM system, which was getting implemented as well as to help with consumer sales data that I was a consumer of. And I did that for about two years. And as I started doing that, I began to like dawn on me, like, wow, at this point, I've been at intel like 12 years or so and I'd actually never really talked to a customer. I said I want to go actually try to go build a product that's consumed by a customer outside of the walls and they actually have to pay for, you know, we're actually going to make revenue on. And so then I moved over to the Internet of Things group and that's where I've been ever since. It's currently called the Network and Edge group, but basically the group that I'm, we focus on all the chips that go into things that are not a laptop, a desktop or a server. So these could be anything from a slot machine to a point of sale system.

Speaker A: So it's very fascinating to me. Like when I think of Intel, I think processors, microprocessors and chips, wafers, but it seems around that's the core. But they have a bunch of other services, unnecessary services that intel provides. Like you just mentioned IoT edge computing and things like that within Intel. What does that look like? Are there like a bunch of teams working on different projects? Obviously I would assume some get spun up, some get retired. But there's a core services line of businesses that intel provide, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So we have three main business groups. One is our consumer client group and that's for your traditional laptop and desktop. Then you have our server or data center group and then you have the group that I'm in, network and edge. And so these are processors in basically in our networks, our 5G networks, 4G networks in any embedded markets. So could be slot machines, point of sale, automotive, these other devices. But around that is a lot of software actually. So we have a ton of software engineers and we're involved largely in open source software and, or software that we basically couple with our uh, processors to drive adoption. Because in order for the hardware to run, you actually need some software to talk to that hardware. And so we develop, you know, drivers. So this is APIs that communicate with our chips and then we work with open source software communities. Like one example is the UXL Foundation. So we're partnered with Meta, uh, Army and other companies to build open source software that allows you to build AI models, um, on any processor.

Speaker A: Amazing.

Speaker B: And so you as a developer, say you're an AI developer, you shouldn't have to worry about learning a specific piece of software in order to write an AI model. And you shouldn't have to worry about which processor that runs on. And so we work on projects like that. So you have all sorts of projects like this that surround the core business and we're always moving resources around depending upon the trends. The current trend obviously is AI.

Speaker A: AI. It's inevitable to talk about AI these days. So let's talk through that. I know you have some really great ideas on AI. Then when we're talking earlier, one of the things I talked about was I seldom or I hardly see an in between tempered viewpoint of AI, depending on who I talk with. Some are more so on the pessimistic side, it's Pandora's box, which is some of that and humanity will take all our jobs. Maybe that will happen eventually. But there's also the yes, AI is the best thing that's ever happened, which also there's a lot of pros to that being ambiguous on purpose. We can narrow it down to product and uh, things you're seeing there. But just what's your stance on AI in general? And then we can narrow it down.

Speaker B: So on the comment of AI is going to take our jobs. I would argue that AI is going to take some of your tasks because AI really going to take an entire job over maybe in some small cases. But is AI going to do a great job at like processing math problems? Oh yeah, it's going to do a fantastic job at that. And so in the case of, you know, I'll give you one example. I recently read an example where a startup is using Zapier and ChatGPT to augment their sales process. They as leads come in through their website, they filter those leads, they determine if it's a workplace email. If it is, then they send a queue over to Slack and they're doing a lot of work of what uh, like an SDR sales development rep might do.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And so what that ends up doing for them is saving their cash burn because now they don't have to have as many SDRs. It's not necessarily replacing an SDR, but it's replacing a lot of the tasks that an SDR might do and then it saves them on headcount, you know, in the grand scheme of things. Is that making things worse? No, I think it's just shifting the landscape.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's an interesting way to look at it because I've also seen along those lines too. Like it's uh, a productivity booster if used appropriately. Uh, where for the SDRCs then we need less SDRs over time because it's augmenting the work that uh, the fewer SDRs they have, instead of maybe processing through 10 requests, now they can do 30 in all. 40. Right. So productivity goes up. But I think in the short term, especially in some industries, contraction, the numbers of rows, because if one person can be 10x or more, more productive than as many people, as many bodies doing those things. So that's an interesting point on that.

Speaker B: And like another one, another example, someone gave this example where back in the day you used to have elevator operators. Like I don't know if you've been in an elevator lately that has someone actually like operating like they sat there and they like they operated and make sure. Because actually it turns out there used to be a lot of elevator deaths apparently because uh, people weren't getting out on the right floor and then like stopping it and then you know, just bad things would happen. You had to have actually have an. But you don't have an elevator operator today, do you?

Speaker A: That's interesting. Earlier we're talking about the example of like horse drawn carriages.

Speaker B: Horse drawn carriages.

Speaker A: Yeah. Where it's like you Know there are a bunch of those back in the day and with the invention of the automobile. Right. And the proliferation of that motorcycles and whatnot, like there was less demand for that. And a lot of those folks lost their jobs, the folks who drove those things.

Speaker B: But it created taxicab drivers.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, in some sense.

Speaker A: And mechanics to fix the automobiles and mechanics. So it's very interesting and that's how I'm looking at it. The say the short term contraction in jobs potentially or the need for certain folks in certain industries. But then I see so much more coming out of it as we look forward. Maybe industries we don't even know about yet. All kinds of jobs. I see listings now for prompt engineer. I'm like, what? That's a real job Prompt engineer.

Speaker B: I don't know if you've seen a recent newsletter from Lenny's newsletter and he featured a prompt engineer, Mike Taylor, who wrote a book. And Mike is currently running an experiment to determine if AI is going to replace product managers.

Speaker A: Interesting.

Speaker B: But he kind of gets into this concept of no, AI is not going to replace people as much as it's going to replace tasks. And so the way that he's testing is what are the tasks that a product manager has to do? How well can the AI produce the output from those tasks? Yeah, like a PRD or a roadmap or things. And so he's going to then test that and measure that and compare the AI results versus the actual product manager

Speaker A: to determine even there are multiple companies now who are building AI agents or AI products to help product managers be move a lot faster, a lot more efficient. Write PRDs, write requirements, collect feedback at scale from users and process them and categorize them. Um, craftful is one of those. Yana Wellinger and the crew. Yana has been on this podcast. Thank you Yana for being on here. But I'm very bullish on companies like that, building tools to enable product managers. So if you were already a good product manager, just a lot better your product management gig and uh, maybe free up your time to actually talk with customers.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Between the we thought it and writing requirements, you can actually talk to more customers. I know you're learning with saying you had been at intel for 12 years and I knew like I need to start talking with customers and building products, revenue generating products. So imagine as you have more tools helping you to do some of the tasks. Right. The administrative stuff, then you have more time to talk with customers and maybe even be able to process through the sentiment of the conversation how did this go and things like that?

Speaker B: Totally, yeah. I think I accidentally found product management, so it kind of landed on me. I didn't land on it, you know, it wasn't something I set out to do. And I wish I had some of these tools when I started because, man, like, yeah, I learned the hard way. And, you know, you're working with your sales team and you're trying to understand kind of their motivations and the customer's motivation. And a lot of information now is recorded and you wish you could be amazing to just get meeting minutes written for you. We have this tool where you can just send in your transcript and it creates meeting minutes within a minute. And yeah, it's off. You can't. You don't just like fire it away, but like, yeah, it's pretty amazing, you know, and it saves you about like 30 minutes of work.

Speaker A: That's pretty cool. There's one I've used, you know, personally called KrisP. KrisP. AI.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And it's a mixture of. It's noise cancellation. I know now multiple tools, Zoom and Google Meets, like have a noise cancellation feature built in. But Krisp is pretty dang good in the sense that I could be in a noisy coffee shop, noisy cafe, whatever, and it kills all the noise around me, directs your voice, it figures out the frequency, I think, and it just sticks it to your voice and then everything else is drowned out. But added a feature as well, which is like AI transcript M. So if a call 30 minutes X amount of minutes you're done, it gives a summary of the call. Here are the things that we talked about and also if there are any action items. So if I said, hey, Joel, by the time we're done, please don't forget to send me xyz. So it's going to create a checklist of all those things. So just little things like that. Now I could still take notes if, you know, that's how my comprehension goes up for a minute. But now I can go check, compare, maybe fill in the blank a bit and then just shoot that out. It's already digitized for me. Yes. There are use cases like that where it's just fantastic.

Speaker B: Yeah. And if you gravitate towards them and use them. But you have to experiment, right? Yeah. I think you're probably more on the early adopter side and you end up teaching people. Right. But there's other folks on the late adopter side that you end up teaching. But I think getting in on early and understanding how these things work is just, you know, can 10x you what

Speaker A: are some interesting anecdotes for you along the way or good leaders you've worked with could even be from books or resources, you know, in your product, career or even in career in general that maybe you go too often or you can't forget because it was that pivotal or influential in shaping you.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think one of the books that's really had an impact on me is from and I'm a Cardinals fan, I hate to say this, Bill Walsh, former 49ers head coach, he's just wrote an amazing book called the Score Takes Care of Itself.

Speaker A: This Score takes care of itself.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And it's interesting already.

Speaker B: Right. Another product leader had provided a list of here's my recommended books. This book talks about the importance of every day. The importance of showing up, being prepared and executing well, knowing what great looks like and then working towards that. And not from the perspective of uh, the scoreboard looks great when you're winning, you know you're winning. But the idea of when you're in the game, when you're in the daily meetings, when you're meeting with your coworkers, when you're meeting with your customers, every little interaction you're having is authentic and you're listening and you're validating people and you're taking good notes and using AI tools and all these things. Basically the score takes care of itself in the end. Yeah, you can't control the outcome. Your product may not take off, but you did all the right things along the way. But some things are out of your control and some things are in your control and that's the things that are in your control. That's a great practice, focus on that.

Speaker A: So would you say another way like because there could be an obsession with the outcome. So it's great to have a North Star what you're shooting for so you can plot your vector. But ultimately don't be so focused on the big picture that you lose sight of the day to day small picture stuff, the minutiae, the details. I really like that premise. I was on a webinar earlier today and we talked about like hey, how do we work in government innovation and how do we start? And one of the things I talked about was start in small chunks. Because if you're so like big picture and scared like that can sound, so can be daunting.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: But if you break it into smaller deliverables where you can have quick cycles to iterate and then iterate test, you know what, it didn't work. You Toss it out and you see why it didn't work. You iterate, you fix it, like, okay, that worked and then you do more of that in the long term. Right. Like it adds up, it compounds versus if I'm so focused on the score where I want to go and then I lose sight of the things in my control. So I really like that premise. That's a great one.

Speaker B: Yeah. I think your example resonates because yeah, sometimes, frankly, your product's not going to take off or your services and, or your business isn't going to generate a ton of money this quarter. But a lot of that's out of your control is the reality. But did you show up every day? Did you do those things and give it your best? Basically?

Speaker A: Absolutely. It makes me think of the journey on growing on social as well. I mean, you know me, I love LinkedIn. I'm very bullish on LinkedIn. So much so that I started community called LinkedIn Guild, LinkedIn Guild, uh, co. And it's this idea for me when I look at growing on LinkedIn, it can be so focused on, hey, I want to grow, I want more focus. But it's like, how do you interact on a day to day basis with the followers you have today? What thoughtful comments do you work on? What meaningful relationships are you building one by one? One by one? Yes, you may have some watershed moments where you get 300 connections or followers in one day because some posts took off or more. But ultimately what are those little details and little interactions? You can focus on improving because it adds up over time. But I can see that concept tying to so many different things in life. Not, um, just with a startup or with a business.

Speaker B: For sure. Yeah. And so I'm happy early adopter of LinkedIn guild. So yeah, I think along those lines, like two things. One is someone told one of my mentors it's not about attention, is about what is your intention. Yeah. And if your intention is just to get attention, you could do that. But is that what you're really going after? And uh, most people that do that aren't going to maybe feel fulfilled or they're not going to achieve that outcome in the end. But if you're out, you know, your intention is to help people or to spread education or you have something to say to the world, then I think that's a good intention and I think that the engagement comes with that.

Speaker A: I'm going to have to make a post on that alone. Like, if your intention is to get attention, what was the other part of

Speaker B: that then you may not feel fulfilled, you may not feel fulfilled, you may not achieve that goal in the end is kind of my guess.

Speaker A: Uh, I like it a lot.

Speaker B: But if you focus on your intention and what that is, then your audience will kind of show up and engage. You'll find your people.

Speaker A: That's cool. Uh, ultimately, that's what we're doing. You're building a tribe of those like you who dig the same things. And like, that's cool. I see you. I like that. And how do you do that? I like to say, how do you grow on LinkedIn in this case without pitch slapping. Yeah, some folks come in hot. You connect with. I just connect with you a minute ago or an hour or whatever, same day. You're like, hey, by the way, I have this product I'm selling. It's like I just met you.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's so many memes, so many great memes about that one, about that.

Speaker A: Or how ultimately can we connect intentionally with our audience, with our tribe of people like us? And that demystifies it a little bit.

Speaker B: And maybe you are selling something, but everyone's not in the market for you think right now.

Speaker A: Do it like a human.

Speaker B: Hey, I'm here. And if you need help with that and I sell something that helps you, just letting you know, I'm here. That's it, you know?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And people will show up to buy when they're ready.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. To bring you back to product a bit. Like, how does that look for you? You know, Obviously at year 12, you're like, I need to talk to customers. You pivoted slightly to working on revenue generating products, talking with a lot of customers. As a product veteran, like, how do you build products that your users need, want and probably need? You need to convince them. Right. Or build cycles into it such that those users or those customers find that product. And sometimes there's a conundrum where a customer doesn't even know, a potential customer doesn't know this is a need or something that love to pay for until you show them. That's why we have sales teams and marketing teams for awareness and then to close it. Well, from a product perspective, like, what does that look like? Building products that your customers may not even realize they want yet without being annoying and shoving down your throats because you know they need it, but they don't know that yet. So how do you cross that bridge, that divide of, you know, the chasm between awareness and getting it in the hands of your customers?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, you know, in B2B world. A lot of couple of things happen. You know, one would be you're typically dealing with like committees. And so, you know, you have to look at that committee and understand the different people within it. And so a lot of times someone needs your product, maybe say someone in the operations department, uh, go back to my Iot experience, they have an inventory problem or, you know, they have some sort of waste problem, and your technology can help them reduce this waste or help them with their P and L. But then you're dealing with the purchasing department, you're dealing with IT department. And so you have these other stakeholders you have to satisfy. And they don't see your solution for this other person as a solution. They see it more as a problem. I need to go manage more IT devices or so when approaching customers, I try to form a mental model of who's this committee, who are we talking to and how can we categorize them and build Personas around them, understand them and understand specifically what their concerns are. Because you're not just dealing with one person, you're dealing with a whole committee.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So you need to help solve for that. And your sales team, they will understand that very well, but you also have to help them through that. And how do you get that built into the product? How do you get built in other requirements outside of your core use case? Like these concerns that the IT department might.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: The other thing is, like, aside from the committees themselves is actually like getting out there and talking to them and trying to connect with them and building a relationship and trying to build more of a collaboration. And as a product manager, I'm trying to let them know that I'm here to help them solve their problem. This isn't just about selling something to them, but rather like, I want to make sure that we are solving this problem and this product is seen as a solution, as seen, you know, as the old analogies, like you have a painkiller, you know, they have a pain and you have a painkiller for them. And if it's not a good fit, then you may not want to go and continue to pursue that because, you know, there's whole world out there and other companies and someone has this problem, it's just your job to go find them.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So, you know, I like to approach it more as a collaboration, a partnership versus a transactional buying and selling situation.

Speaker A: People feel that stuff when it's transactional. I would assume the majority of people don't. When you feel sold to and it's transactional, and commoditized, it can feel icky and annoying. But when it's in the perspective of it's collaborative, you're here to work with them, um, you're listening to them. I think most people, me included, I appreciate that in products that I use and companies that I'm a customer of.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: So a lot of folks, increasingly I see an interest in product. You know, product as a space has grown remarkably over the past decade or so or more, and a lot of interest there. But from your perspective as someone who's built a thriving career in the product space, like, and this is ambiguous again, what would you say to folks like looking product, what are some interesting things from your own experience that you would give as advice? Like if I were to want to get into product today, like, what are some things I should think about? Where do I even start? There's so much knowledge, a deluge of knowledge out there, some not helpful. So I guess it's a two part question. One, advice from your own experience on growing product and getting in there. But also part two is like upskilling. How do you stay ahead of the curve? Right, to keep learning and being a, uh, forever employable product manager? Pretty much, yeah.

Speaker B: So I believe it's important to understand, kind of going back to intention, what is your intention or what are those things that you get passionate about? Because product manager can apply into many industries and there's different types of product manager roles. So there's growth product managers, core PMs, there's platform product managers. And so in the case of those three examples, a growth PM is, you know, focused more on the metrics and how do we drive improvement in our conversion or how do we drive improvement in our, uh, onboarding? Less about the core experience, but more about the metrics. While the core PM is focused on the core user experience and that core problem that you're solving and how you might go about solving that.

Speaker A: Nice.

Speaker B: Whereas the platform PM is at a level of it may be more technical, may have an engineering background, and they're thinking about the platform and how it can apply in many industries. So they're thinking like at the API level, how do I create APIs that people can call into and call out of? And so one would be specialization. Don't think of it as just a generic product manager role. Another example is are you comfortable talking to customers? Because actually we have product managers that are within our IT department, as I mentioned before, and they're not out talking to external customers, they're talking to internal customers, building IT systems inside. And if, you know, some folks may not desire to work with sales team outside of the walls, they want to work inside the walls. That's perfectly okay. And maybe that's a better fit for you. So kind of think, try to interview different product managers in different roles and titles to try to get a sense of what their job is versus saying, hey, I want to just be a generic product manager.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: The second part of your question, I think, is like, hey, how do you, like, stay relevant? Or how do you continue to upskill? And for me, the big thing for me is finding those mentors to talk to. I think you do a lot of this. You know, you try to get insights from different people and try to bring in best practices and, you know, really understand what different people are doing and try and identify, like, what it is, what skill sets you need to go develop.

Speaker A: And it's a hack. It's a, uh, hack for sure.

Speaker B: Yeah. If someone solved this problem, why not go talk to them? Right. Versus trying to, like, learn it all on your own. Obviously, you're going to need to apply it in your situation.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But talking to folks is going to. Yeah. Shortcut you into solving these challenges. Really.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for sharing that. It brings me to another concept which I've heard you talk about. You're the only other person I've heard talk about this. You know where I'm going with this? Slash careers.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: What does that like? Could you elaborate on that? Uh, you know, when you say having a slash career, what does that look like?

Speaker B: So this is actually a book. Another book. It's by Marcy L. Boner.

Speaker A: Another great book suggestion.

Speaker B: Another great book suggestion. But the concept is, like. And she gives great examples. I love the book because it's not, like, so theoretical. It's very grounded in actual evidence, like people's examples. You can have your career that pays the bills, but then you can have these side bets or these side hustles or things that you do outside of work that give you fire. Because one thing that I found is there was a point in my career, in terms of leadership and growth, where I was beginning to actually get frustrated because I didn't feel like I was growing. I wasn't getting certain opportunities because the company didn't have them for me.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: Uh, and so it was frustrating because I thought that it was, like, the company's fault. And I hear this sometimes from other folks at work where they're frustrated because we're not doing something or the strategy is wrong or this or that and they're not getting an opportunity. And what I learned is actually, you know, you can go make those opportunities outside of work. And so in the book, for instance, Marcy gives an example of someone who's a teacher, but they're also like a flamenco dancer outside of work. They're an accountant who is a, uh, chef. Yeah. And so they started a website and built recipes. And so they actually had this outside interest and they developed that outside of work on their off hours. And I'm a big fan of that because I think it makes you a well rounded person.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: And for me, like when I come to work every day, I just feel so much better because I feel fulfilled because I'm not one. I'm getting more fulfillment outside of work with the activities that I do.

Speaker A: Yeah, I really like that concept because also. So it fills your tank with doing things because sometimes not everyone is fortunate to be paid for a job that they're passionate about. Right. There's this Venn diagram. You've probably seen this off the ikagi. Yeah. You know, how do you find that sweet spot of what you enjoy doing? You can be paid for and all of that stuff. Not everyone gets to do that. Or it's not perfectly smack dab in the middle where it's uh, a perfectly balanced percentage of all of those things. Sometimes yeah, it pays the bills. Yeah, you could do it, but are uh, you really passionate about it? So you get to fill your tank, lack of a better term, outside of that thing that pays the bills. Again, sometimes it's a perfect amalgamation of all of those things. But not always. But another thing too. Having a slash career is if for whatever reason the other one took off this thing you're passionate about, you've de risked it by having a main gig, a main thing you're doing while you grow the other one or other things and it gives you options and opportunities. Right. For you to go in that direction later on or. I've heard of people who retire like a gentleman. I, uh, was talking with recently, I don't know what career he had, but wasn't a creative one. And he retired from that, a regular job and now he's picked up photography. He's built that interest over the years, videography, photography, landscape especially. And he's doing that. He's having a blast. But then he built that over the years while having a main thing and built the craft and experience there such that now he had the option to do it again post retirement. He can do that. So I 100% agree. Like, it brought into your horizons. It makes you happier in the interim while you're doing that. And you never know, like, where that takes you.

Speaker B: Yeah. And a lot of us don't know. You know, you don't know what that is. And so you need to explore and you need to have that cushion. And it's like you're incubating, Right. It's like you're incubating something. And in order to incubate something, you need to have a steady kind of foundation to work from. Um, because it's hard to just like, go and quit. Say, I'm going to quit. I'm done. I'm going all in on this thing. Most people would say don't. Some people say to do that, and some people have been successful doing that. But that's probably a little bit of survivorship bias built into that.

Speaker A: Yeah, Majority of those. I would say a larger percentage. Right. It's crash and burn again. M. I can't emphasize de risking things enough. It's like, have something that is stable. You work on your experiments on the side. Versus having the experiment. We're talking about this earlier. Versus having the experiments be the main thing. You're going to be stressed to the moon. But if you can de risk it a bit as well by having a main thing and, uh, you work on those, then you have the option. You can weigh it with a clear mind. Should you go full time with that or not? But it's nice to have the option. That's been my experience. I've gone full time into things before the risky endeavors and struggled through it, survived through it. I'm still here. But in hindsight, for some of those, it's like, probably wouldn't do that again. Right. And that's entrepreneurship as well. Most people say if they know what they know now, probably wouldn't start. And that's, uh, a blessing and a curse because so many entrepreneurs who go all out to undo things, it's like, yeah, if they had the full picture, they probably wouldn't. But there are those success stories that did because they didn't have the full picture. And it worked out really well. And so it's a blessing on the curse. But if you have the opportunity, it's like, uh, de risk it by doing everything on this side would be where I lean from personal experience. Which brings me to small bets. We've talked about the small bets.

Speaker B: I know small. I love small bets.

Speaker A: You know, small bets community and the idea of, right, hey, long goaling. Make a bunch of Small bets. Iterate on those and scale them. So can you talk about that a little bit more? Because I know you're part of that community. By Daniel Vassallo.

Speaker B: Vassallo, yeah. And he was a former Amazon engineer, I think he's based out of Seattle. And at some point he, you know, was not feeling fulfilled at work. And he created this community, Small Bets, which the whole community is just built around this idea of having small bets or having a portfolio of small bets. And I think the broader concept is eventually you get enough of these that uh, you can actually replace your income.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: If you have enough of these small bets. And it's a lot of different people kind of this mindset, gathering with ideas. You know, they present kind of what they're doing, how they're trying to grow it, and they actually give very tangible advice. And there's just these free seminars that they give several times a month and then there's a community you can chat with. Because I think a big part of this too, the scary part is always you feel on your own, you know, you feel alone. It's entrepreneurship, it can be lonely. And they really discovered something there where, you know, you have a community coupled with content and it's all instructional or helpful with the intent of helping other people succeed.

Speaker A: You know, that is cool. And you shared that with me a while ago and it's part of the inspiration for Modern, different and some other small bets I'm making. Like I, uh, have a chrome extension, some small SaaS, utilities communities, and this idea of like building useful things and building community around that and scaling it over time, you might exit some of them, you might sell them off, or you might consolidate and have like a parent thing that owns a bunch of those. But for me it's a lot more fun when it's small bets over time because you also learn a lot through the iterative process and then it can flow into other subsequent ideas. And it's just cool to be doing that with other like minded folks who are doing the same thing, making small bets. So I appreciate you for sharing that with me a while ago.

Speaker B: I feel like with you even a big part of this, your enjoyment just comes from the learning itself.

Speaker A: Yes. Right, yeah. Uh, the curiosity I wish for you, I know for you that's a big thing. A big part of your career growing and working consulting with startups has been you pursuing your curiosity along the way. What has that looked like? When you say if you've pursued your curiosity and grown and just find enjoyment in being curious, what has that looked like. I keep asking you these multi pronged questions. What has that looked like? And how might one develop a mindset of curiosity and possibilities?

Speaker B: It's a great question. I pondered this like some people are just not as naturally curious I think. And then on my side, arguably the curiosity can actually be a hindrance for me because you can get too curious. And you know, I love solving problems, I love understanding people and how things work and things. But I also have to remember at the end of the day, you know, you can't stay in curious mode forever. You do need to get to a point where you build. Right. Uh, so that was part of my learning as a product manager is how to get out of research and into to execution and getting something out the door.

Speaker A: I wonder if that's a natural arch for pmc, but put a pin on that, we'll talk about that more.

Speaker B: So I think for me the curiosity comes at, you know, you try to find this product market fit. Well for me it's also. And Naval has brought out this concept, Naval Ravikant, he says it's not just product market fit, it's product market founder fit. And so from me, you know, being curious, I actually like and I like helping other people. Well, part of this is let's go do customer discovery together. I'd like to show you the techniques I've learned, but let's go help you figure out who your customer segments are and what are the value propositions you're offering for them to help them solve their problems. Because it's a messy process, it's a hard process and then it involves a lot of data, which I love data. But you know, when you're interviewing customers, it's not quantity, it's not totally quantitative, it's a mixture of qual and quant. So I try to bring this all together and package it up in a way where I can help others. And so I've been working with the Maryland uh, Energy Innovation Accelerator and startups that are funded out of there and then I get partnered up with them to go help them do this discovery work and I really leave them in a place where they're off on their own or they can come back to me if you know, they have questions.

Speaker A: Yeah. So to get actionable things to apply and run with and then reach out to you as needed to augment that knowledge and execution.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: I like uh, that, that's really cool. I wonder if that's a natural progression for PMs. At least for me. I resonate with that because I'm also naturally very curious about things. And inherently you get enjoyment from just the mere knowledge and learning something new and going at rabbit hole and trying to solve a problem. But it's so easy to get stuck on the research knowledge phase because that's just fun for you if you just stay there. It's like, it's never enough, right?

Speaker B: It's never enough.

Speaker A: But making that shift to execution and closing the loop for me was a big thing. I'm still working that. I'm not perfect yet, but I had a boss years ago who identified that in me. You could see that I was very curious and I love learning things and it's like, oh, yeah, I'll learn that. Uh, you know. But he saw that I think you spin your wheels a little too long in the research phase. So he really helped me understand and walk through the yes, research, but add time boxes. I'm going to research for this long.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: And I have to get to execution for the outcome desired. And then I can go back to research again too. It's a whole loop. And that was phenomenal.

Speaker B: That's awesome.

Speaker A: Over the past few years, that has helped me. I actually trademarked this a bit ago, and it's called MSD3.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Um, my own coin term for being able to rapidly go through ideas. So I have the map, which is the first phase of research. Go as crazy as you want. This sketch, which is tight, makes some loose association. If it's drawing right, this is where you m. Make a quick sketch. No details yet. Maybe you draw grids at that point, again using analogy of drawing. And then the, uh, other D is not design at this point, you're filling it in some more. You're making those connections and then you have the developer, which, okay, you're building the thing or you're writing an article or whatever it is. So the tangible aspect of the work. And then there's the, uh, deliverer, which is the last D, because, you know, if you don't launch it, if you don't get in the hands of someone

Speaker B: or publish that article, it never happened.

Speaker A: It never happened. It's just still an idea.

Speaker B: Almost.

Speaker A: Almost. It's not done. So for me, that's a quick loop. I go through, you know, MSD3 for rapidly researching and going from idea stage to done. Whatever done means you define what definition of done in the map phase. So you know, when it's complete and then you just do that again and again. So working with my, you know, boss years ago, and my experience, I've Gathered over the years has helped me, like, design that. And it just helped me rapidly go from research to done research to done. Vest is wasting so much time in the research phase, which is my natural bend.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. And the timeboxing aspect was, like, a huge unlock for me. Just, you know, you have to just draw a line in the sand and move forward. And the other part that helped me, a recent unlock, is you think of yourself as an entrepreneur, and there's a difference between a wantrepreneur and an entrepreneur. Yes, the entrepreneur is studying, reading, taking classes, but they actually never launch a business. Yeah, More courses. More.

Speaker A: Signed up for 20 courses on Coursera, but completed only two.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, but you never launch. You never tried to make that first dollar, you know, and so you got to move from entrepreneur to entrepreneur.

Speaker A: Yeah, I like that. Ah, I like that a lot. Oh, my gosh. And again, I think that's a progression because as the one, you gotta want it at first, but at some point you gotta ship things. It won't be perfect. Yeah. But, you know, making that first dollar, if we use the analogy of selling something, it's so rewarding. If you can make one, you're like, okay, can make a bunch of ones. It adds up. I remember when I sold my first digital product, or the first time I was paid for something outside of a job, was I designed a course and worked on a curriculum and a course for a company. It was internal. They launched it for the team members and customers. But that was just so. I think I sold that for probably a couple hundred dollars. But that was just, like, the amount of time and effort I put into it was a lot more than that. But for me, it was just so amazing that someone, uh, was willing to buy this knowledge resource.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: Um, and then it helped me create a lot more. But that was the first iteration of my age. When I started the agency years ago, that was the first thing I was trying to figure out. You know what? I created a course. So that helped me launch and build some confidence for more. Eventually, it became web design and digital marketing and products and all of that. But that first sale was so instrumental in many more.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: Down the road.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I bet you said, hey, you know, I can do this. Right? You know, get that feeling like the imposter syndrome starts to, you know, go away a little bit. You know, we suffer from that, you know, as product managers. Right. Like, am I doing the right thing here? Am I, you know, is this team on track? And all those Things. But if you're doing it on your own and you actually got paid, I mean, then you get some validation.

Speaker A: Yeah. Like, oh, okay, there's something here. I can do more. Imposter syndrome is a very interesting concept as well that doesn't get talked about enough, I think, because ultimately, here's my hypothesis. Like, I think imposter syndrome never really goes away.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Because if you're doing bigger things and challenging yourself and pushing yourself, uh, you always have a level of imposter syndrome because you get comfortable with something like, okay, you do more, you do more. So you're always operating at a slightly higher capacity than what you've always done. And since you haven't done that before, there's an element of fear and risk of will this work out? Am I qualified for this? I've, uh, operated at this level and now I'm going for this. Like, can I really do that? And the Alt MBA talks about, I did the Alt mba, Seth Godins, Alt MBA years ago. And one of the things we talk about is fear. Getting comfortable with fear and dancing with it. So I'm putting imposter syndrome and fear sort of together here. But it's like when you get comfortable with it, the fear doesn't ever really go away again. If you're doing things, crazy stuff, and pushing yourself, you're gonna like, can I do this? The lizard brain kicks in. Run, you know, lion, ah, uh, you're gonna die. Or whatever the fear is. But as you get comfortable with it, like the fear begins to take a back seat.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So in spite of it, you ship. And you could argue that over time, as you get used to shipping and doing it again and again, the whisper of fear. You hear it and you're like, whatever, I will still do it regardless. So imposter syndrome is maybe even fear of X, fear of the unknown, fear of making the leap is something that, uh, I think I'd like to explore a lot more. And what does that look like for those who, in spite of that, to go on to achieve so many great things like total absence of fear? Or is it they just got a lot more comfortable with it and maybe the voice just gets less and less and less where it doesn't impede them. M from progress.

Speaker B: Yeah. When you say voice that really resonated because what is that voice? Is it, you know, my fear is people aren't going to like me. Or is it my fear is I'm not good enough? Or what is that core kind of belief?

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And where is that coming from. And do you tap into that and actually look at it and then try, um, to label it versus ignoring it?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You know, what's the hack here? And it's not necessarily a hack, but it's just growing. It's part of that growth, like you said. Because what you come to realize, I think you're kind of alluding to this is as you challenge yourself and as other people are challenging themselves, they reach new levels. And if you're challenging yourself and reaching a new level, what you discover is they didn't know what they were doing. They're just making it up and figuring it out as they go.

Speaker A: As they go.

Speaker B: And that's how we got this beautiful world we're in, because people figured things out.

Speaker A: Yeah. There's an interesting letter from Steve Jobs where he talks about. And I'm gonna paraphrase this heavily, maybe in the show notes or something I can link to it. But it's like this was, I think, when he was close to passing away. Like, I speak a language that, uh, I have no meaningful. I didn't make any meaningful contributions to, uh, he's in technology, obviously was a visionary and stuff, but, like, he built on the shoulders of giants. You know, he contributed to those, but he didn't start all of those. Like, it's a long list of things, and it's like essentially ending with it's grateful to be alive at a time as this, where so many people have done things that he gets to enjoy and maybe add to by a lot of the work, you can say, of the language of English. Right. But I don't think a lot of us in our lifetime are going to add new words to the English language. But we get to use it every day and communicate with it. Technology. Right. We get to use it, maybe expand on it. But a lot of the core is already built, a lot of the principles and mathematical principles already built out. So it's very interesting to, you know, think from that perspective and be grateful for that. Like, there's so much that has been done. And you said our beautiful world. And how can we have developed that posture for me of awe. Ah. I just awe. Ah. There's a lot of pain, suffering, uh, pain, uncertainty and chaos. But we think that there are a lot of possibilities and a lot of things to be grateful for that we just were. It's a great fortune for us to be born in a time such as this to leverage those things. So, you know, when you said that, it just made me think about that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I mean, to think about for a while. Yeah.

Speaker B: Just going back. It's like, uh, things, you know, horse drawn carriage. Can you imagine what, you know, life was like so long ago? We're. And in 50 years, you know, people are going to look back about the barbaric things that we were doing today. Look at you. You know, you were on a podcast. I haven't seen whatever the thing the next thing is. Right. And so today's wants become tomorrow's needs, you know.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Because of these continuous advances we keep making, you know, so it's amazing.

Speaker A: Well, thank you so much, Joel, for being on the podcast with us today.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: What would you want to leave those listening with? Just one thing you want to leave the audience with.

Speaker B: I would leave the audience kind of with like, uh. My inflection was being able to like, you have these small bets outside of your main thing and explore those, because you might just find something there. And what you don't want to do is just end up at the end of your career and then retire and then not have that next thing. And so you want to have that slash career or that second career, however you want to frame that. Because I think that that keeps you engaged and interested. In fact, you might find your next passion so amazing.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: Thank

Speaker A: Sam.